MORGAN: What's shelf life on dire predictions?

Monday

Nov 27, 2017 at 4:00 AM

BY TOM MORGAN

Be frightened!

You probably will be if you read the article I did. It is about global catastrophes headed our way -- if we don’t change our ways, that is.

This is a serious article in the journal Bioscience which is endorsed by 1700 “leading” scientists. It warns that if we keep doing what we are doing, our air will grow more polluted and our supplies of clean water will be reduced to a trickle. Our supplies of fish also will dwindle because our oceans are dying.

The scientists warn us that our land will grow less productive, our forests will shrink and we are going to have mass extinctions of species. Our unchecked growth in population will drive more people into poverty, causing more malnutrition.

Wait a minute! I just checked the date on that issue of the journal. It was twenty-five years ago. Sorry, I got behind on my reading.

Golleee! I hope we have made those fundamental changes. If not, we must have snuffed it.

By the way, Bioscience recently published a similar article. It is equally as scary and endorsed by thousands of “leading” scientists.

It makes a bunch of similar dire predictions.

I know you want to rush off to pack your survival cave but before you do, let us look at our dismal behavior. If we are still here, we must have changed our ways, right?

Tch, tch, tch. We did not control population. It grew 34 percent. We have burdened our weary earth with nearly 2 billion more of us.

Naughty, naughty. We did not move away from fossil fuels as the scientists warned us we must. We use 56 percent more today than we did 25 years ago. We did not cut back on the sin of “overconsumption.” Far from it. We are nearly 60 percent ahead of where we were back then.

If we committed the above sins, we must be running dry of clean water. Actually, we have a lot more of it. Only 76 percent of humanity had clean drinking water back then. Today nearly 90 percent do.

What about the fish? They must be kaput by now. Actually the per-capita supply of fish worldwide is 30 percent greater today than then.

Surely poverty must be more widespread. After all, we’ve ravaged the planet, haven’t we?

Well, about 40 percent fewer people are undernourished today. Those living in abject poverty are 35 percent fewer now than then.

Meanwhile, our land is far more productive today. Not less so, as the scientists predicted. We feed 34 percent more people than then. And we feed them with more food than before. Yet we use the same amount of land as we used then.

Our air is cleaner – at least in the U.S. We breathe in less of every single pollutant the EPA measures than we did 25 years ago.

The scientists told us we would lose millions of acres of forest. Actually we lost a mere 3 percent. In the U.S., that measure improved.

The scientists predicted we would whack the supply of new medicines because we were destroying species. There now are 5,000 new treatments in the drug pipeline.

Scientists who endorsed the dismal report in the latest Bioscience? They are deadly earnest with their dire predictions. As earnest as the scientists who endorsed the gloom in the journal 25 years ago. They call for worldwide belt-tightening. And massive central planning by governments. As did so many scientists 25 years ago.

Those of 25 years ago were blind. Blind to the power of free-market capitalism. Blind to the innovation it spawns. The latest batch are just as blind, I suspect.

Acknowledgement: I stole all of the above from an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily online. And I heartily recommend IBD’s editorials and commentary. In IBD opinion, you will not find blindness. You will find optimism and trust in free-market capitalism.